Rita Banerjee

On March 27 from 5:30-7:30 pm EST, join Vermont College of Fine Arts’s MFA in Writing & Publishing program live online for its Friday Night Reading Series featuring poet Kenzie Allen, novelist & children’s book author David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and cross-genre writer Erika T. Wurth!  The event will be moderated by Director Rita Banerjee and Associate Director Lizzy Fox!

The event is free and open to the public and will be live-streamed online.  Audience Members are asked to mute their microphones and turn off their video during the reading.  They are welcome to switch audio and video back on when asking a question during the Q&A portion following the reading.  The event will be broadcast via Google Hangouts, and you can join our readers at the following:

VCFA’s MFA in Writing & Publishing program presents:
Kenzie Allen, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Erika T. Wurth
Friday, March 27, 2020 * 5:30 – 7:30 pm EST

Join Online: https://meet.google.com/_meet/gyk-jddp-eup
‪Join via Phone: +1 502-208-5166‬, PIN: ‪754 370 900‬#

About Our Guests

Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is currently a lecturer at York University and an R1-Advanced Opportunity Program Fellow and PhD Candidate in English & Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Kenzie’s most recent project is a multimodal book of poetry which incorporates intergenerational histories and diasporic movements, Haudenosaunee traditions, and archival materials of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and her BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems can be found in Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets, and other venues, and she is the founder and managing editor of the Anthropoid collective.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is the author of the novel Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins, forthcoming 2020) and the children’s book Spotted Tail (Reycraft, 2019). His work appears in Shenandoah, the Yellow Medicine Review, Transmotion, the Criminal Class Review, and other magazines. He’s the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Ragdale Foundation residency, and the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and was a Tin House Scholar. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s associate professor of Native American studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver and lives in Colorado with his family.

Erika T. Wurth’s publications include two novels, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend and You Who Enter Here, two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and has been a guest writer at the  Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Boulevard, The Writer’s Chronicle, Waxwing, and The Kenyon Review. She is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and has been chosen as a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is represented by Julia Eagleton at the Gernert Agency. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.

Rita Banerjee will be presenting and leading the 2020 Muse & Marketplace session “Genre-Curious? Becoming a Successful Multi-Genre Writer Today” on Sunday, April 5 from 11:45 am – 12:45 pm.  More information about the session follows below:

Genre Curious?  Becoming a Successful Multi-Genre Writer Today

Sunday April 5, 2020 * 11:45am – 12:45pm
St. James Room – 4th Floor * Block 10, Lecture with Q&A
Muse & Marketplace 2020 Conference*

From Carmen Maria Machado to Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, and Ben Lerner, in today’s literary world, writers are increasingly jumping the genre tracks.  Speculative fiction writers are producing memoirs, poets are producing novels, novelists are producing essay collections, and essayists are becoming poets.  So why are so many authors today so genre-curious?  By writing in more than one genre, do authors continue to tap into their creativity daily and avoid writer’s block?  Moreover, what about the myth that successful, commercial writers only produce work in one genre?  In this talk, we will discuss how authors can navigate the publishing world, learn new craft techniques and genre forms, negotiate with agents and editors, and produce the books they need to while building a career as highly successful multi-genre writers.

Writers can sign-up for the session while seats remain open here.

About the Author:

Rita Banerjee is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018) and Echo in Four Beats (FLP, 2018).  She is also the co-writer with David Shields of Burning Down the Louvre (2020), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France.

* Please Note: That this event has been postponed due to health concerns.

Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop for our offsite reading at Rosella Coffee House (203 E Jones Ave, Suite 101) in San Antonio, TX! Featured readers include Rita Banerjee, Madeleine Barnes, Alex Carrigan, Kristina Marie Darling, Charlene Elsby, Adilene Hernandez, Tim Horvath, Samuel Kóláwọlé, Rachel Kurasz, and Mari Pack! Come celebrate with a gorgeous night of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative writing!  More info on the reading & featured authors below!

Featured Readers:

Rita Banerjee is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018).   She is the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, featured on the Ruth Stone Foundation podcast, and named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018”, and was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry.  Banerjee is also the author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010).  She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2020), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France.  She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and she is a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grant, the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, and South Asia Initiative and Tata Grants.  Her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an Associate Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard.  She is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.  Her writing is represented by agents Jeff Kleinman and Jamie Chambliss of Folio Literary Management.

Madeleine Barnes is a poet and visual artist from Pittsburgh living in Brooklyn. She is a doctoral fellow at CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in English, and the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets prizes, and the Princeton Poetry Prize. Her second chapbook, Light Experiments, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press this year, and her protest embroideries were recently featured in Boston Accent Lit. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine.

Alex Carrigan is an associate editor with the American Correctional Association. He has edited and proofed the anthologies CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018) and Her Plumage: An Anthology of Women’s Writings from Quail Bell Magazine (2019). He has had fiction, poetry, and media reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Life in 10 Minutes, Realms YA Fantasy Literary Magazine, Mercurial Stories, Lambda Literary Review, Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019) and the forthcoming anthologies Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia Press, 2020) and Whale Road Review (Summer 2020). He currently lives in Alexandria, VA.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.

Charlene Elsby, Ph.D., is the Philosophy Program Director at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her first novel, HEXIS, was published by CLASH Books. Her second novel, AFFECT, is forthcoming with The Porcupine’s Quill.

Adilene Hernández is a queer, Latina writer and educator with roots in Atlanta, GA. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Knox College, and she aspires to continue her studies through an M.F.A. program. She is an alumna of the Winter Tangerine Workshop and Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on her first two novels, both of which focus on family ties and identity in the Latinx culture.

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review and Consequence amongst other literary journals. Samuel was a finalist for the 2018 Graywolf Prize for Africa and winner of the 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa,  Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute. Samuel was educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa and an MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA. His debut novel The Road to Salt Sea is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins.

Rachel Kurasz is a PhD student at Northern Illinois University where she is studying rhetoric/composition and Graphic Novels/Comic Books.  Rachel earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University under the guidance of Christian TeBordo and Kyle Beachy. Rachel also was a Fall 2017 AWP writer to writer under mentor Laura Creedle.  Rachel is currently querying and writing her first graphic novel series entitled “weirdos”.

Mari Pack is a poet and writer from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She has an MA from the University of Toronto, and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College.